She's Kind of Crazy That Way
by Tribeca
Summary: Sometimes love can make you lose your mind. *complete*


**A/N: Just a warning, this fic is pretty angst filled and contains the subject matter of mental illness. If any of that bothers you, you may want to skip this one. It jumps around a bit and may seem disjointed but I wrote it that way on purpose to display the sense of discontentment that befell their lives. As always, it's just fiction, I really don't know what the hell I'm doing at all. I just closed my eyes, put my fingers on the keyboard and this happened. Because Shenny.**

SHE'S KIND OF CRAZY THAT WAY

The soles of her bedroom slippers tapped in rhythm with the old rocking chair, her feet pushing gently causing her to sway to and fro. She grinned over at me and I watched, intrigued as always, by the markings of time that had settled across her face. She was older now and she wore it well. I caught a puff of air between my cheeks, pushed my tongue forward and blew a sticky, sweet bubble from my mouth. I always made sure to get the pink bubblegum because pink was her favorite color. She did what she always did, extending a wobbly index finger, permanently curled from the effects of arthritis, and promptly poked a hole in my bubble.

Licking my lips, I returned a younger replica of her grin and dug the gum packet out of the pocket of my jeans.

"Want some?" I asked.

This had become a running joke between the two of us. She was sixty-four now and we both knew that her sixty-four year old teeth and bubblegum were not a good combination. But I always offered and she always gave me the same reply:

"You know if you swallow that, I'm not gonna pop it when it comes out the other end."

We both laughed like it was the first time we'd had that exchange, but it was probably well over a hundred times by now. I always conjured an image in my mind of a big pink bubble blowing out my ass and it made me laugh just a little bit more.

"Gran, you feel like taking a walk or something? The nurse will be in here soon to get you back into bed for the night. If we are going to walk, we need to go now."

She shook her head and pulled absentmindedly at a silver strand of hair that had come loose from the carefully coiffed bun that sat perched high in the center of her head.

"No, I better not leave. Sheldon will be over soon. I'm going to make his favorite dinner tonight. Spaghetti and hotdogs."

I reached to gently pat her hand and felt my chest tighten. I sucked in a deep breath and squeezed my eyes together, commanding them to stay dry.

"I don't think you have to cook for him tonight, Gran. I brought pizza, remember? Let's walk down the hall. I heard they have ice cream for dessert."

"Oh you never know what that whack-a-doodle will do next. I like to stay close to home in case he needs me."

I sighed and nodded, "Okay, Gran."

"He loves me, you know," she said solemnly, lifting her gaze to meet mine.

Her eyes, colored with tiny red veins splattered around cloudy green irises, bore into mine.

"I know Gran, I know he does."

"You look a lot like him, you know. Go look in the mirror, how you look now, it's how he looked the day I met him. Handsome boy, you are. Just like him."

She was right. I was older when I'd finally met him, my grandfather, but there wasn't a thing I didn't know about him. A simple internet search would generate thousands of hits with his name, as the impact he'd had on the scientific community was unparalleled. Almost every article contained an embedded picture of him and I felt as if I were looking at a reflection of myself each time I looked at him.

"He finally won that Nobel Prize he'd been chasing for years," she shook her head, "He was really something."

"Tell me more about him, Gran," I choked out, knowing I couldn't stop her from talking about him even if I tried.

~s/p~

My dad resembled Doctor Sheldon Lee Cooper even more than I did. I felt bad for him because he'd never gotten over the feeling that his existence, something he had absolutely no control over, had torn our family apart. Dad had gone over our family tree with me when I was just a kid. He'd told me he didn't want me going through life searching for my identity the way he had.

I'd been shocked. I suppose in my youthful bliss, it had never occurred to me that my grandmother had a real life outside of the one I'd always known. It's funny how you never see your elders as having once been young, experiencing the passions and the pains of youth, making choices and altering lives.

When he'd turned eighteen, my dad had changed his name. The young man whom for eighteen years had been known as Leonard L. Hofstadter, Jr became Lee Cooper. And he'd named me, his only son, Lee Cooper, Jr. He'd inherited his father's brilliance and had left home for the best of universities to pursue his studies. He was thirty years old when he met his father for the first time.

The elder Doctor Cooper had broken down sobbing upon finding out the truth.

And my Gran? She just went crazy.

~s/p~

The nurse came in and got Gran back into the bed. I'd stepped out to the hallway to stretch my legs, get some fresh air and give Gran a little privacy. After the nurse left, I went back in and pecked Gran on the cheek before settling back down in the chair.

She had that faraway look in her eyes now, the one that she always got when she talked about him, which was often. The way her mind worked now, we never knew if she would be speaking in the past or the present tense. I don't think she knew either. Sometimes she was still that twenty-six year old girl trying to land an acting gig, the twenty-six year old who was in love with her boyfriend's roommate. And other times she was her sixty-four year old self, reminiscing on a life that may or may not have ever really happened, drifting seamlessly between reality and fantasy. My favorite was the perfect world she'd created in her mind to compensate for the real one she'd actually lived. Her reality was married to a man she should have never been with, and she was the mother of a son whose father was somewhere in Europe married to a neurobiologist he never wanted to marry.

But oh, her fantasy was long walks on the beach with Doctor Sheldon Cooper, holding his hand and watching the sun rise...endless nights spent dancing and dining and loving...love and marriage and children and the good guys winning in the end...that was Gran's best fantasy and no matter what her doctors said, or how many times my parents rolled their eyes and huffed exasperating breaths of air, I supported my Gran and backed her up all the way. She believes in happy endings and I do too.

We, our family, my mom and dad and me, had been told by a psychiatrist long ago that we just needed to go with whatever Gran said. No amount of medicine or therapy could pull her out of the world she'd created in her mind. It was her body's way of preserving itself from the painful heartbreak of her life. The best, most humane thing we could do for her was to accommodate her psychosis, a mental disorder that had stolen her from us. She had lived in this assisted living institution for years now, but in her mind, she was a permanent resident of an apartment building at 2311 Los Robles, Pasadena, CA. She had no way of comprehending that she woke each day to the fresh air of cool Nebraska mornings.

"Well," she said sternly and without an ounce of shame, "I loved him the moment I laid eyes on him. He later told me he felt the same way the first time he saw me too. We should have done something about it then."

She paused and sent a lopsided grin my way, then continued, laughing as I popped another loud bubble in an effort to contain the sorrow I felt for her, for Doctor Cooper, for all of us whose lives their unresolved feelings had affected.

"We brought out the best and the worst in each other. But I was in and out of a relationship with his best friend, Leonard. And then just when I was getting brave enough to finally tell Sheldon how I felt, how I loved him, he met Amy. Amy Farrah Fowler."

Gran sneered and rolled her eyes, "The bane of my existence, that Amy. You know, she broke my nose once. Remind me to tell you about that someday."

Gran had already told me about the day Amy had broken her nose. In fact, she'd told me at least a dozen times. But she didn't remember a single one of them.

"Before we knew it, I was engaged to Leonard, and Sheldon was engaged to Amy. But when we were together," she rolled her eyes to my face and I was sure I saw her blush, "God, it was magical."

I reached for her hand and squeezed it lightly. She continued, "Lee, I only hope that you someday find the passion and love that Sheldon and I had. And that you are stronger and more brave than we were, that you don't let social conventions dictate how you love and who you love."

"Aw, Gran," I said, overcome with grief for her, "you've had a good life."

Like my father and my father's father, I'd never been good at lying and my twitching eye gave me away instantly.

"Liar," she mumbled. Then she laid her head back and drifted off to sleep.

~s/p~

_"You're marrying Amy next month," she breathed into the delicate freckled skin of his neck._

_"And you're marrying Leonard tomorrow," he whispered, dragging his trembling fingers across her forearms._

_"We should stop before this gets out of control," she said unconvincingly. _

_"I need to know you want me, Penny."_

_"Sheldon," she reached to push him away but when her hand made contact with his heaving chest, she instead pressed her palm against his heart and rested it there lightly._

_"I want you to want me," his voice was ragged now and Penny felt as if they were moving in slow motion._

_Giving in to her passion, she moved her mouth to his ear, "I want you so badly, Sheldon. I want you so badly that there should be a better word for want."_

_"Now," he said in a low, hoarse voice she'd never heard from him._

_"Now," she gave her consent. _

_He pulled her closer, his long denied desire apparent to them both._

_She reached to touch his face at the same time she felt his thumb wipe away the remnants of a teardrop that had slipped down her cheek. _

_"I don't want to talk," she decided and told him so, pulling him, kissing him, all the way to her bed._

_He'd slowly undressed her, and watched as she did the same to him. His hands memorized every inch of her flesh and her mouth quickly found his and they gasped together, their intimacy almost overwhelming. He'd told her he loved her as he moved in and out of her and she cried and said she loved him too. They loved through the night and awoke tangled together as the sun began to rise on her wedding day._

_"Call off the wedding," he spoke, his first words of the morning._

_"Call yours off," she countered, biting him harshly on his shoulder, determined to leave her mark on him._

_He groaned from the exquisite pain she was inflicting on him and reached to pull her face to his._

_"Kiss me," he demanded and she did._

_He'd taken her again, both knowing it could be their final time together. _

_"Here's your phone," Penny said, pushing it towards him and scooting to a sitting position, "call her."_

_He pushed the phone back at her, "You first."_

_She twisted the ring on her finger and sighed, "We're both still cowards. Even after this beautiful night, at the end of the day, we are still cowards, aren't we?"_

_He ran his hand through his hair, "That appears to be the case."_

_"Well then, we both deserve what we get."_

_Eight hours later he stood next to Leonard, his body still aching from the night he'd spent with her, and watched as she married his best friend. _

_Penny was in Nebraska the day Sheldon and Amy married in Texas. Leonard was there to stand up for his best friend. At the reception, Leonard apologized for his wife's absence, then confided in Sheldon that Penny was suffering from bouts of morning sickness, she'd been pregnant for a month and they had agreed she'd conceived their child on their wedding night. Sheldon watched as his champagne flute slipped from his fingers and crashed to the ground._

_He'd stepped away and phoned her before he and Amy left for their honeymoon. The panic in his voice had chilled her to the bone._

_"Leonard just told me," he said breathlessly when she answered._

_"Sheldon," she whispered, placing her hand across her abdomen. _

_"Could it be mine...ours?" he asked quietly, looking over his shoulder to confirm his privacy._

_"What you are doing now, Sheldon?"_

_"I'm...well, I'm standing in the vestibule of my mother's church."_

_"At your wedding to Amy," she hissed._

_"Looking at your husband in the gathering hall," he fired back._

_She sighed, "What are you plans, Sheldon? What are you and Amy going to do now that you're married?"_

_"We will be leaving for Europe...to teach and conduct research in our respective fields...we plan to reside there for the foreseeable future._

_She gripped her phone tighter in her hand and drew in a sharp breath._

_"Fine. It sounds perfect for you and Amy, just what you need to do. Forget about me. The baby is not yours, I've already had the tests done," she lied. "Go off and do your research, win your Nobel Prize, make all your dreams come true."_

_"But Penny," he whispered into the phone, "you are my dream."_

_"I have to go Sheldon. I always loved you, but we just weren't meant to be. You are where you belong and I have what I deserve. Goodbye."_

~s/p~

The next time Doctor Cooper saw Gran, she was divorced. Their son (my dad) was a grown man who had a son of his own...me, Doctor Cooper's one and only grandson. And Gran had been committed for permanent, round the clock, psychiatric care. That was years ago.

We'd all been shocked when, just last year, he'd bought a small house in town. And we'd also been surprised when we discovered he'd divorced his wife, turned his research over to Doctor Rajesh Koothrappali, and began to visit Gran every afternoon and evening. At first he'd maintained his distance and we'd in turn, respected his privacy. My dad and he had shared a few afternoons together attempting to make up for lost time, Doctor Cooper pleading for my dad's forgiveness. My dad had assured him there was nothing to forgive, Gran had made her choices long ago and the rest of us just had to live with the consequences of those choices.

I was here visiting every Thursday night and Gran, for reasons I didn't understand, had taken to referring to Thursday nights as "Pizza With Lee Night." And you guessed it, I brought a large pizza pie with me every Thursday evening. We'd have dinner, she'd tell me all about her time in Pasadena, the real and the not so real, then she'd drift off to sleep and I'd kiss her goodbye and leave, then repeat it all again the following Thursday.

I stood and watched her sleeping. I was sure she was dreaming of him. She always did. I was accustomed to hearing his name roll across her lips while she slept and this time was no different.

I bent to kiss her, to bid her farewell and promise I'd be back next week for "Pizza With Lee Night."

"Goodbye Gran," I said, brushing the hair from her face, "I am sure my grandfather loved you very much."

I lingered over her momentarily, wondering why God allowed some people to suffer so greatly whilst others sailed through life untouched by any degree of heartache. The sound of a throat being cleared broke the silence in the room and I straightened and turned towards the door.

His piercing blue eyes cut into me defiantly as he spoke, "I assure you that I loved...that I still love...your Gran very much, Lee."

I moved toward him, extending my hand, although I was aware of his aversion to touch.

"Doctor Cooper," I said to the grandfather I barely knew.

He offered a tight smile and took my hand, "You're my flesh and blood, young man. Never hesitate to offer a firm handshake, it's a sure sign of character."

I smiled, embarrassed...for what I don't know..and motioned him into the room. He took the seat I'd just occupied and I leaned against the wall beside him, both of us watching Gran sleep.

"She's still so damn beautiful," he said and I would swear I saw tears in the great man's eyes, but I looked away out of respect.

"Yeah," I agreed, "she is."

"I should have stopped that wedding...claimed her as my own."

"Well," I searched for wise or comforting words to offer him, "hindsight is always better than foresight." It was the only thing I could think of.

He smiled, this time a sincere smile, "Ah, so is my grandson a philosopher of sorts?"

I grinned back at him, "I don't know what I am yet, Doctor Cooper. I'm still trying to figure that out."

"Lee," he said warmly, "would I be imposing too much upon you if I asked you to indulge me with a less formal title than Doctor Cooper?"

I shrugged, "What are you suggesting?"

He hesitated, then reached for Gran, wrapping his long fingers, fingers that seemed identical to my own, around her hand.

"I..._we_...thought it would be appropriate, as well as very appreciated, if you'd refer to me as Grandfather, or you know, some derivative there of."

"Wait, you and Gran discussed this?"

He smiled, "She has her moments. Occasionally I'll see small glimpses of my Penny, the Penny I used to know all those years ago."

I studied his face, his aging eyes glistened with a mixture of hope and pain. Maybe he was able to get through the craziness and reach her, maybe out of all of us, he was the only one that could find her beneath the ruins of her mental state.

I eased my hand down to his shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze.

"I'd like that," I said, then I laughed and added, "Pop Pop."

His eyebrows shot up and a low laugh escaped, rising deep from his chest.

"Pop Pop? May I ask why you are choosing that particular term of endearment?"

I winked at him, and nodded towards Gran, "Her."

He shifted in the chair, extended his long legs and crossed them at the ankles, "Understood. No further explanation is needed."

"Later, Pop-Pop," I said, giving his shoulder a final pat and then heading for the door.

"Goodnight Lee."

I stopped just outside the door and peered in, curiosity getting the best of me. I watched with fascination as he scooted his chair closer to my Gran and then lowered his mouth to her hand and kissed it softly. I strained to listen. Then I observed him do the oddest thing. He balled his hand into a fist and began to tap his knuckles lightly on the metal railing of her bed.

Tap, tap, tap. "Penny."

He tapped three times and said her name. Then he did it again. And then a third time. I watched as, after his ninth knock and his third time calling her name, she slowly opened her eyes and grinned up at him.

"Hi Moon Pie," I heard her say.

"Hello Penny," his voice was solid, but even I, a guy who doesn't understand much about human relations, could tell that it was bathed in love.

Upon realizing he held her hand in his, she began frantically scanning the room with her eyes.

"Stop Sheldon! What if Amy or Leonard see us?"

"It's okay Penny. We're safe here. I've got this," he assured her in a soothing tone.

I watched with sadness as anger crept across her face.

"I LOVED YOU," she screamed.

She began to push forward and tried to swing her legs to the side of the bed but the thick canvas straps prevented her from doing so.

I heard him sniff and could tell he was holding back tears.

"You can still love me," he said, pushing at the straps around her wrists. "I still love you."

She froze, as if trying to process his words.

"I WANT TO BE WITH YOU. I DON'T WANT TO MARRY LEONARD," she yelled, her feet squirming to break free from the straps that bound her ankles.

He stood and bent towards her face and I could tell he was placing kisses across her forehead and cheeks, his lips absorbing her tears.

"DON'T MARRY AMY," she screamed, her voice breaking with pain.

"It's okay, it's okay," he pleaded, "it's just you and me. They aren't here anymore."

"I hate them," she spat out bitterly, sobbing softly into his shoulder. He remained bent over her body, his face inches from hers.

"No you don't," he said calmly, "no you don't. It's over now. It's just you and me, okay? You don't hate them."

"Why not?," she ask, her voice taking on a childlike quality. "Why can't I hate them?"

"Because," he said, straightening her gown and tugging the sheet back into place, "a very smart woman once told me that love trumps hate. Remember?"

She smiled up at him, "Yeah, yeah I do. That was me, wasn't it?"

"Yes it was."

I watched as his words began to calm her. He twisted around to reach for the hairbrush that rested on the dresser next to her bed. He slowly lifted it and started brushing the stray hair from her face. She closed her eyes and sighed.

"That feels great, Moon Pie."

"Good," he said. "I'm going to take care of you Penny."

"I always loved you. Always," she said, her body stilled now, her eyes taking him in as if he were the only man in the universe.

"And I you," he whispered.

And then he did something really weird. He started singing her this crazy song about a kitten or a cat, I'm not sure which, but she knew the song too because she started singing it right back at him.

It was time for me to leave, and as I walked away I heard my Gran say to my Pop Pop, "I've loved having you in my life."

I knew then that this thing between my grandparents, unconventional as it had been, was a love story like none other. Sure, theirs wasn't a perfect love, but really, does anyone ever have a perfect love? Their love was flawed and messy and painful. But sometimes, sometimes, just to know love, to be loved, to feel love, is all that really counts in the end. And though others had tried for years to keep them apart, to dismiss and deny their love, to stand between them and tear them down...in the end, my grandparent's love? Crazy as it was, it mattered. It really mattered.


End file.
